Just to be sure I would take this to the battery section of the forum and ask around there, I am sure some EE or some other skilled ones will be able to tell you both if steel is usable for a performance pack and how to measure them steel plates and then do a similar test with copper and nickel cut in similar size that way you will know what will be the best option for best performance and the least amount of wasted heat. The battery blocks by itself are clever, and if space is no issue I really like the idea of a repairable battery that can be fixed without spot welding and the use of a dremel.

Shawn says this about the conductive properties of the plates. He uses

"galvanized 1010 steel. The steel is 12% as conductive as copper. The zinc coating is 27% as conductive as copper. Compared to spot welding? You need resistance to weld. Solid nickel strips are 22% as conductive as copper. And the battery builder may have used nickel plated steel- it's the most common connector. And the strips are small compared to BatteryBlocs connectors. The larger the connector the less resistance. And the larger the connection area the less resistance. That's why BatteryBlocs' connectors are massive and the tops are open to allow massive contact area. I'm not saying one way is better than another, I do both in my shop depending on the job. I spot weld when I have to fit the cells into a small preexisting case. But when I am just building a battery, I go for the modularity and solidness of BatteryBlocs."

When I ordered I got extra "parallel" plates (plates used to connect each 10P group together in 5S. So since I'm using double what he normally sells as a kit I'm hoping I don't have any heat issues due to resistance of the metal plates. My build isn't SUPER high power compared to some of the crazy builds on ES, its pretty moderate. I have a temperature sensor which I might just plant somewhere in on of the 5S stacks to keep track of any heat.

I am sure it will work, just thinking it might work better with copper. In some of the crazy builds done here at ES they have used solid copper bus bar as series connection to carry enough current without heat and losses. And as prone as copper is to corrosion I would think if steel was a good choice they might have used steel bars as bus bars to avoid corrosion. Another downside of steel is that the heat conduct properties of steel is lower then copper, so if it should make the pack, or cells hot maybe the steel would slow down the cooling process? A scooter compared to a bike will be a little more husky and got more mass to carry around, and when going flat out from red lights to keep up with traffic that current will flow rapidly from the battery. I imagine a scooter will get more wide open throttle - full stop - wide open throttle then a regular e-bike because a scooter will primarily be ridden in traffic on smooth surface, where an e-bike might be ridden in a bike lane, among pedestrians and places where lower speed are mandatory. Just thinking out loud here as I am about to jump into the scooter conversion myself, and I really liked the idea of the battery blocks, just not sure about the steel sheets.

Anyway the super cool thing with a battery build with battery blocks is that it can all be taken apart if needed. If you should find losses are too big, or heat should be an issue it should be easy to spend a sunday afternoon swapping steel for copper or nickel plates.

All good points I appreciate your input macribs! This is all new ground so hopefully my build will be of help to others. Even testing the Batteryblocs for that 12v battery it was a breeze, since I messed up with the grouping of mAh capacities- I easily de-constructed re-arranged and put back together in less than 20min.

I'm excited to see how this larger packs will turn out since I got my LG MJ1's yesterday!

I'm a bit upset- I started putting my battery blocs together and I guess I got a few defect 3d printed modules. When I put the 16 cell one together it was fine, these 10P ones a lot of them don't fit the cells correctly. I thought it was just a "tight fit" and until the plastic holder scratched off some of outer plastic of my nice shiny new LG cell Some of them also haven't been printed properly. Its unfortunate there hasn't been any kind of quality checking.

Anyways I've left a message with Shawn hopefully it can be resolved. I've managed to put together ten 10P packs so far, the ones in the cardboard box are defects- broken or dont fit

Last edited by smeagol222 on Mar 31, 2017 10:57 am, edited 1 time in total.

Hmm that does not look promising. Too bad quality control is lacking, hopefully you get replacement parts.
I think I will look for other solutions for a battery build. Still not given up on the idea of solder less pack, so I will keep searching.

For now lets hope this a an isolated incident and that the man behind the battery blocks resolve the issues for future customer. Will keep an eye on this thread crossing my fingers this get fixed and you have no other problems assembly the pack.

Sorry that my first post is such a negative one, but I've been watching those Battery Blocs for a while and I (from being a mechanical engineers' point of view) cannot believe that someone can allow himself to sell such *beep* to people, at least without letting them know beforehand that these are printed in a (clearly cheap/poorly set up) FDM 3D printer.

You should be waaay past the point of having these molded either by injection molding or silicone mold before you start up a website and sell your stuff like it's a serial produced part.
What strikes me just as much is the simplicity of the blocs, and how cheap a mold would be to make. One wouldn't even have to make a separate mold for each bloc, if a little creativity was used...

Sorry for the rant. I was just following your thread so eagerly until I saw that you were gonna use those blocs I'll be constructive from now on.

Shawn will replace defects he says. So far I've got 2 out of 4 stacks together! (2 groups of 5S10P) Still waiting on my XT150 6mm connectors before I'll actually be able to use them after an ebay item location mixup (auction said USPS from USA, but actually coming from china )

But in the meantime I can cut the 4" fence post tubing to size and connect the balance leads and 10 awg charge cables with XT60's

Tired of waiting for the new BatteryBlocs so I started making the plastic casing. Cut the plastic pipes, battery blocs fit perfectly- such good protection for them. So the red caps will be nuts and washers on the end. Then an extra nut at the end before the plastic lid to keep them all together.

I had this idea of using a $8 cutting board as the lid, but found out it was just crappy fiber-board covered in plastic sheet. Since I have extra room at the top I think it would be cool to get some clear plexi-glass then I can see the CellLogs inside. I'll also mount some switches to turn them on and off. I got this metal handle I can bolt on also.

Got a bunch of little warning indicator lights, these will work great as dashboard visual indicators hopefully I'm able to attach to the CellLog alarm-out wires

A motorcyclist is never late, Frodo Baggins. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.
My Suzuki RF400 build: now with Enertrac MHM602 and 6kWh AESC modules protected by a Zephyr BMS
Renault Equation modded to 10S6P recycled laptop 18650s & 1kW controller.
Master of Electric Motor Selection: "Adopt a motor" (PM me if you have trouble editing)
All the gear, all the time!

That cutting board seems like the best way to get HDPE. I think I might go with clear plexiglass this time, when I wont have to figure out how to mount the CellLogs to the outside of the top lid. All I'll have on top is the handle and 4 switches and I'll be able to see the CellLogs inside

I finally got the BatteryBlocs replacements. This 3D print run seems to be much more solid- I can even tell the red plastic colour has changed and the "DPI" seems to be 'thicker' if that makes sense. Really appreciate Shawn sending these replacements. I completely love this idea, they go together so easily, I will keep this updated with performance metrics I get from my CA.

Last edited by smeagol222 on Apr 19, 2017 11:24 am, edited 1 time in total.

A motorcyclist is never late, Frodo Baggins. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.
My Suzuki RF400 build: now with Enertrac MHM602 and 6kWh AESC modules protected by a Zephyr BMS
Renault Equation modded to 10S6P recycled laptop 18650s & 1kW controller.
Master of Electric Motor Selection: "Adopt a motor" (PM me if you have trouble editing)
All the gear, all the time!

So I put together the first 18v pack- being veeery careful with my impact drill on those nylon bolts- only really to get them most of the way then finger tighten. Shawn supplied me double the metal plates for series connections, since there is a fair bit of current going through. I put the fat terminals on then ends ready for the 6awg. It should work out ok since there are gaps for wires to run along the side and up. I will have to angle the negative terminal at the bottom so when it stands vertically it doesn't damage it. Maybe ill put them on one of the 2 inner bolts- we'll see for a better angle.

I tells ya once all the bolts are together and the threaded rods are through this thing feels SOLID (I screwed up cutting these rods too short having forgot about the red end caps, gap at the top and plexiglass lid so they're for testing now). After it goes into the plastic pipe its going to be next to indestructible haha. It does add quite a bit of weight but I'm willing to take that considering how repairable and re-buildable this will be. There's also a nice bit of gappage between the cells for air flow.

Now working on putting the little balance leads onto the smaller terminals for the CellLog and additional JST for balancing. I'm so happy this is starting to come together, next big thing is the main circuit and taking that friggen tubeless tire of the old hub wheel. Got some car tire leavers and rim protectors coming. Put it on a 5 gallon bucket and make sure I have a beer in hand to ease the frustration heh.

XT60s will be for charging (72v bulk) and main terminals for each block balancing (will probably have to create some kind of un-plugable parallel harness.

I got the plexiglass lid (12x12" 9mm thick was only $12CAD but I had to ride 40km to get it hahha) it fit inside the saddle bag like a glove! - it is clear, the blue is just the protective plastic I haven't peeled off yet

Hammer crimp worked great- I soldered also - seems like a really strong connection. I used double heat shrink in some places, will probably also heatshrink over the shaved insulation parts just in case any flex makes a wire exposed. I ran the negative terminal the 'long way' since I wasn't comfortable it being so close to the pos of the 2nd last cell (paranoid about a short I guess)

Next was wiring up the 18v packs and installing the connectors. Geez putting 6awg onto 6mm xt150 connectors was a pain the the ass. I had to use dremel to shave down some of the insulation to put the insulated connector on, then take a couple of the wire cores out to fit inside bullet cup with solder. Installing two 5S JST connectors (one for cell log under plexiglass, other lives outside lid with for balance charging along with the xt60 charge and xt150 discharge connector).

Finally got all the XT150 connectors done, completely finished one pack. I added a charge lead with xt60 connector and 10awg. Had to cut down the nylon bolts a bit so it would fit into the 4" fence post tube. Also made all the bolts the same way around.

Setup the xt60's for parallel harness (ready for parallel 5S 21v balance charging). I balanced charged 1 pack from 3.5v to 4.2v at only 2amps- and it took like a 1.5 days! I'm glad I have my lifepo4 20ah pack to use when this pack needs balancing. It showed about 20ah for 3500mah cells which seemed about right considering the cells were already partially charged.
Will do a full balance when they're all together- I wonder what amps I could charge at when 'fast charging'. BatteryBro says fast charging is supported, but doesn't mention what amps.https://batterybro.com/blogs/18650-whol ... ew-3500mah

Hey man, looks like you're well on track! Attaguy, this thing's gonna be mad decent.

smeagol222 wrote:oh good thats a relief - yeah tell me about its its been ages. I can't wait! Another problem I thought of is the kelly controller programming. My other battery is going to be more powerful. I wonder if kelly have a bluetooth dongle to program it on the fly. Or even better the one set of programming will be good for both batteries

I would absolutely recommend the Kelly Bluetooth dongle. I use it on my Android with the Kelly app all the time to tweak and monitor/diagnose things and I love not having to worry about a cable. The only thing is you should give it a quick wrap with tape to waterproof it if you plan to keep it plugged in always. Just search the site, they have it. Same connection as the USB cable.

You have a KEB... I have a KLS. They don't have bluetooth for KEB? That's unfortunate. It seems they also don't have an Android program. Man

Your next best bet would be to have the USB plug mounted in such a way as to embed it somewhere secure with the female socket exposed so you can plug a USB cable straight into it without having to undo any side panel or anything. Keep a little cap on it to battle water, and keep a cable nearby for easy access. That would be almost as good as being wireless. The only thing is you need some kind of Windows machine handy to plug right in. If you frequently carried a Surface Windows tablet and the software was compatible, that would be as best as I could see it.

The main thing is that you don't want to be set up so that you have to undo a panel to access a cable, and have to have a giant laptop on-hand at all times to do any troubleshooting. These bikes can do funny things. One time I got caught in a very sudden and harsh downpour, and as I was climbing a hill I lost power to the motor. Was it the throttle? Was it the 3-gear? Was it a fuse? The controller? Was there corrosion in a pin somewhere? Who knows? So I pulled over and opened up my Kelly app on my phone over bluetooth and noticed my "brake pedal" value was reading 255... the damn thing thought it had a brake pedal depressed to the max, for some reason. I set "brake type" to 0 and rebooted the controller and instantly had power back. Imagine trying to figure that out without having easy access to diagnostics of that sort, or needing a dry place to undo panels and whip out a laptop! Untenable. So I would try to plan for such events by setting myself up for diagnostics as much as possible. You also want to be able to change things like "brake regen %" on the fly in case you want to tune it down because the roads are wet, or adjust low voltage cutoff depending on if you want to run your cells a little lower than usual to gently limp home on a low battery, etc.

I hear ya- I picked up a second hand little netbook "Asus EE-PC" for $60CAD, plan to have the USB plugged in all the time & waterproofed with extension lead into my tailcase trunk so I can program on the fly

We will see how it goes.. this was a quick fix instead of buying a KLS controller. There is another annoying thing about KEB is the motor and battery current limits (70% of battery current). Which is fine in my case since I only need 60a continuous (my modular battery LGMJ1 20s10p does 100a cont.) But when I plug in my 65a/80a lifepo4 I'm expecting to see some performance decrease (and would have to re-program when switching)

Fany from Kelly controllers explained it like this, but I still dont understand. If anyone can make sense of this I'd really appreciate it!

Me:

"max motor current" setting is percentage based on battery or controller?

Is the "max battery current" setting 70% - it doesn't look like it can get to 100%? Does this mean I will never get 100% of battery current?

What do you think is best settings if I have 2 different spec batteries. I want to have max performance for my QS 4kw cont. 7kw peak max 90amp 10" v3 wheel

Only 70% max for KEB? Why? That means my batteries have to be 30% more powerful for the same output??

I don't understand your settings for each battery my motor can support 90amp peak. This means I want to hit approx 90amp for starting take off torque, but I cannot with settings below?

Battery 2 - 72v 35ah 20s li-ion LGMJ1 is more powerful but its current is at a higher limit?

From what I understand your recommendation

43% of Battery 1 will make it 27.95amp continuous and 36.55amp peak?
50% of Battery 2 will make it 50amp continuous

Fany

As you can see,the KEB72601X is 280A peak on the motor phase.
If you set up the motor current and battery current at 100% and 70%,the battery current is 280A*100%*70%=196A.
I don't think you really need 196A peak on the battery side.

Battery 1 - 72v 20ah 24s Lifepo4 with BMS for 65A cont. and 85A peak.
This battery only can take 85A peak.If the battery current is allowed to 100% setting,it is too much for this batter pack.It is not good.
So the max battery current setting is 85A/280A=30% We can release a little for margin or high temp weakening.The range can be 30%-43%.

Battery 2 - 72v 35ah 20s li-ion LGMJ1 cells (100amp cont.)
The peak current could be 120A for this battery pack?
So it is 120A/280A=43%.As the same goes,there is a range for the ramping.
The motor current is set at 100% in both cases.

And the actual settings must be tuned up after testing the vehicle on the road.

I've always wondered about that myself. I'm not the best person to ask, since, being self-taught my understanding of the fundamentals of electrosity is pretty shaky, but what I've always figured it is it's probably something about the difference between "Watts" and "Volt-Amperes". With inductive loads like electromagnets, the power given, versus the power taken, can be quite different. It's something called the "Power Factor" which I don't really understand, despite watching several minutes worth of youtube videos on the subject.

As for your bluetooth issues, I've got a KEB controller, and I had the idea to buy a bluetooth-to-serial adapter, and maybe at least that way I could use my laptop without having to plug it in. In theory it should work, but I couldn't get it to. It paired, showed up as a regular COM port, but the kelly software couldn't find the controller. According to Fany the serial settings should be 19200,8,N,1, but I think I must have tried every combination with no luck.

What I'd really like to know is if anyone has managed to get ahold of the protocol kelly controllers use to program them over serial. If we could figure out which sequence of bytes to send over that serial port, we could maybe even program it to use 100% battery current.

If no one has access to the communication protocol, I'm half-tempted to try and reverse-engineer it. What I'd really like to do is set up an arduino with a rotary encoder and a little LCD or something set up as a power dial. Dial the settings up to where you want them, press a button, it programs the controller via the serial port. You'll probably have to power-cycle the controller for it to take effect, but I still think it'd be amazing to have a power control dial you could change at a stoplight.

Ah thanks inedible. Yeah Fany said the KEB isn't bluetooth compatible, would be cool if the bluetooth to series adaptor worked. Let me know if you get somewhere with this, would be cool to have a few quick settings to reprogram the controller. Its so weird about the 70% thing, I guess I'll see how the performance is and perhaps upgrade to the KLS controller later on perhaps.

Well I finally got all the Batteryblocs packs together with the XT150 connectors, JST's and xt60's for charging. I made two XT60 harness's - one parallel for balancing and one series for bulk charging (I know their chunky AF, but it make the most sense to me when putting them together) picked up a little deans to xt60 connector which was handy. I treated myself and got the 72v satiator replacing a whole bag full of chargers. I balanced them all separately with the iMax b6 and it went well, now all there is left to do is assemble the plastic tubes, and plexiglass, wire some switches for the CellLogs and the handle on the top. Will wire the alarm outs to red LEDs for the dash, going to test what the alarm out cable does first.

Also changed the hub motor on the tubeless tire. Good lord that was a pain the ass. Lots of windex, sweat and beer. I managed to use the disc and caliper that was on the previous hub motor, it fitted like a glove!!
Removing the valve was annoying too. I have to say though compared to the hold hub motor the new ones must be about 3 times as heavy. QS seem to make really solid product. The phase wire difference is quite noticeable too

smeagol222 wrote:Yeah Fany said the KEB isn't bluetooth compatible, would be cool if the bluetooth to series adaptor worked. Let me know if you get somewhere with this

Yeah but that's the thing, serial is serial is serial, even over bluetooth. Bluetooth provides a "serial" profile, which emulates a RS232 serial port. Should be the same as connecting two computers together via RS232 or by USB-RS232 adapters. We should absolutely be able to plug a serial-to-bluetooth adapter into the controller and have it show up a regular serial COM port on any device that connects to it, including laptops, phones, whatever. Really not sure why that part doesn't work, and Kelly wasn't anxious to troubleshoot this for me.

So, but the point is trying to figure out the protocol used to program them. If we can figure out what bytes the program sends to the controller while programming it, we can figure out how to make our own app (or arduino-like device in my case) to program it to whatever we want, using a physical device, with physical buttons we can press on our bikes to set current.

I really think if I put in the effort, I can make a "power dial" for my bike using an arduino. We just need to know more about the communication protocol they use. I've sent an email to Fany asking if Kelly can provide the protocol for their controllers, but we'll see what they say. I'm not super optimistic.

I'm not an electrician, so I can't tell you much about power-factor, but as an IT person, I can tell you a lot about serial communications protocols. Technically, the KEB is absolutely 100% bluetooth compatible. The bluetooth protocol supports serial, and KEB controllers are programmed by serial. We can make an app for that, so long as we can figure out which specific bytes to send over serial to program the controller.

Dude, good luck building an app for that. Although my bluetooth is working fine, I'd be interested in your results because I see a lot of potential. For instance, if the app can report statistics on the fly (e.g. controller/motor temp), then we could build dashboard meters for such things. The Android app is a bit clunky. While connected, it drains my phone's battery rapidly. The display also cuts off based on my phone's resolution or something so I had to memorise a few buttons' functions since the labels are obscured. Still great tech, but obviously could be improved upon if it were open source. Kelly might have other priorities though.

Notice I was able to exceed the maximum RPM setting of 15000 in the Android app. In the Windows app, an error-box will prevent writing a value above 15000, but there is no such check in the Android app. I don't think it makes a difference in my top-speed however.

The folks at Grin (Cycle Analyst) would almost certainly be open to collaborating. I've seen them in person, and they're super chill to talk to. They love discussing ideas about their product and troubleshooting. I had an idea where a phone could be hooked to the CA and used as a full-colour meter for voltage, speedo, temps, trip data, etc. All you'd need is a cheap handlebar mount and a way for the CA to broadcast to the app (either via cable, and it could then act as a charger, or over bluetooth). I keep my phone on my bars when the weather's nice and was thinking how sweet it'd be to have full-colour, nicely animated meters. The simple dot-matrix LCD is so plain and can be challenging to get a glimpse of at high speeds. I imagine future vehicles will take into consideration this kind of aesthetics. Obviously there's a lot of room for flexibility, and if you could download skins / etc. it could become very popular in the future as electric vehicle technology catches on. Here're some ideas:

It would be nice to be able to set up draggable meters, e.g. like widgets, that the user could place based on what he wants / has set up already with the wiring.

Smeagol, your build is looking great. +1 for QS product quality. They're really cool guys. I used to have the same motor as you but I traded it up for a slightly larger, 72-120V 8kW version. I think they under-rate their product too since my 8kW motor is being run waaaaay past its redline. My only gripe was that they used vinyl wrapped phase wires inside the motor, which I melted. (The motor can draw 30-50kW battery power at peak on my system.) I replaced those with high-heat silicone wires (200°C) and haven't had any problems since.